‘Google Totally Slimed Sun,’ Says Java Creator James Gosling

With Oracle and Google at each other’s throats in a San Francisco courtroom, Java creator James Gosling popped up this weekend and offered his opinion on the intellectual property dispute between the two companies.

“While I have differences with Oracle, in this case, they are in the right,” he wrote on his blog. “We were all really disturbed, even [former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz] just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.”

The comments won’t have any impact on the court case, which is ongoing, but they give trial-watchers a little more insight into how Sun Microsystems felt a few years back, when Google decided to pass on licensing Sun’s Java platform and write its own version of the software from scratch. Oracle bought Sun in 2010 and promptly sued Google for $1 billion, saying that Google’s software violates its Java patents and copyrights.

The trial is being closely watched by Silicon Valley, in part because of Oracle’s claim that Google’s operating system violates its copyright on Java’s APIs, or application programming interfaces. Right now, it’s not clear that APIs can be copyrighted. So if the San Francisco court upholds that claim, it could set a disturbing precedent for many open-source projects, including Linux, which have written software to APIs that they do not own.

Oracle is also claiming, however, that at least in some cases, Google actually lifted software code from the Java platform.

In court testimony, it’s become clear that Sun wanted to license Java to Google. What’s not so clear is how upset Sun executives really were when the two companies failed to come to terms and Google decided to write its own version of the Java platform, called the Dalvik virtual machine.

Last week, Jonathan Schwartz said that although Sun wasn’t happy with Dalvik, it had no plans to shut it down with a lawsuit. “We wanted to build the biggest tent and invite as many people as possible,” Schwartz told the court. Another ex-Sun CEO, Scott McNealy said the opposite in court, Farber reported.

The Google-Oracle trial is being conducted in two phases: the first addressing Oracle’s API copyright claims, and the second will examine two patent claims. Google and Oracle gave their closing arguments in the copyright phase on Monday, so a ruling there could happen anytime.